GoDaddy back online following Anonymous attack

GoDaddy restored some services yesterday as the company battled online attacks that severely impacted its hosting and domain-name registration operations.

By
Jeremy Kirk
| Sep 11, 2012

| IDG News Service

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GoDaddy restored some services yesterday as the company battled online attacks that severely impacted its hosting and domain-name registration operations.

"We're still working," the company explained on Twitter. "Getting closer to normal. Thanks for all your patience and understanding."

Elizabeth L. Driscoll, vice president of public relations for GoDaddy, said that the outage started around 6.25pm in the UK, and services for the bulk of affected customers were restored at 8.43pm.

DNS server attack

"At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised," she wrote. "We will provide an additional update within the next 24 hours."

The attack apparently affected GoDaddy's DNS (Domain Name System) servers, which direct browsers to the correct IP address after a domain name is requested. GoDaddy temporarily redirected its DNS traffic for GoDaddy.com to VeriSign, which also registers domain names and runs the ".com" and ".net" top-level domains, Driscoll said.

"Our services are now back to normal, we are no longer redirecting DNS traffic," she said. "It was helpful because it allowed our customers to manage their accounts while we restored services. We thank Verisign for their assistance today."

Related

Anonymous

GoDaddy, one of the largest domain name registrars, manages some 48 million domain names and has more than 9.3 million customers. A member of the hacking collective Anonymous took credit for the takedown, claiming it was in retaliation for the company's support at one time for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The company later reversed its position.

The person, who goes by @AnonymousOwn3r on Twitter, took sole credit for the attack. The person was the subject of both admiration and invective on Twitter, as the attack caused significant disruptions.

Data collected by Netcraft, an internet security and monitoring services company in Bath, England, showed the GoDaddy.com domain was offline for a few hours on Monday afternoon, although it appeared to be recovering.